…and it will be my last…

I am listening to Bach’s Wohltemperiertes Klavier. Today it has the same effect on the pace of my heartbeat and my soul as the first time I really listened to it, as a ten-year-old in one of my piano lessons. I still see my piano teacher’s allure at the piano. She did mark me a lot, but I was a bit young to emotionally grasp some of her lessons back then. I went to this music and folkdance event today, on occasion of the sheep having gone to the mountains in the village across in the next valley. It made me happy to listen to the music and see the dancing, and sad because I have been neglecting this need within me, and I know that part of my stress could be greatly reduced by making more music. I remember living at home and playing for no reason. The piano just drew me in and I just played for a while, and during that time, I did not worry. It is a different kind of concentration than the one mostly used in writing work. In this village, I did not get the opportunity to practice an instrument. I have found myself taking notes, though, and starting to sing, in the silence of my room. Bursting into song. I misunderstood fieldwork. I got it wrong. I am so stressed I forget to breathe and I am surprised that I suffocate. It is true that fieldwork is not exactly a normal life situation, and this is what makes it harder. Yet, I cannot merely bet on its transitory nature, just like I cannot be content with the transitory nature of life itself. I cannot keep it all locked up, and think that typing it up will provide enough emotional release. I want to live more fully again, and spend time with people my age, and be somewhat relieved by their youth and their jokes and their mischief and their willingness to embrace life. I’d like to think that I am an optimistic person with a dark sense of humour, but with a lot of need for joking around, but I have been so caught up with all kinds of other things. This being-bottled-up makes my body receptive to all kinds of ailments. Being happy is often easier than I think. Worry less. Enjoy more. Do not take it so personally. Remember Kahlil. Be content with the ways in which it is not up to me. Wear down my clarinet like this accordeon I saw at the festival today.

Fill the air with more music. For no reason at all. And try to remember that tune that I heard played by the Vienna Art Orchestra. It’s called ‘Everything Has Its Own Time’. Truth of the year, quite possibly. Yours musically, beat-shell

Ishq and Mushq

I spoke to a friend on the phone. We had agreed ealier to go to the mountains that day. He said he would be a bit late, when I had been waiting all morning for the crystallisation of a time, having asked for that the evening before, but not having been granted a time-appointment. Having learnt to be more patient with people’s troubles and lives, I did not get angry, just a little anxious. I said ‘what is a bit?’ (I should have said, what does it mean for you, ‘a bit’…). He said, well ‘a bit’, using a synonym. He thought my problem was the word. It wasn’t, as you might have guessed. I merely wanted to stabilise all this flexibility. He then got it, and said, well a bit, between 10 minutes and an hour. How much this collates with reality, I have not found out yet. However, I thought this was an answer that presupposed some knowledge of how I work. But consider long-term relationships (like family relationships and friendships and romantic relationships) and all the misunderstandings that go along with time. I have another reading for you that brilliantly conveys this, and a lot more. A story about a twice-migrant family (India to Kenya/Uganda to Britain) who, like any family, have a lot of things covered up in silence, and make a fuss about details, and refuse to forgive, and keep those grudges under rattling pressured lids. The opening sentence is: ‘remember there are only two things in the world you cannot hide: ishq and mushq’ (smell and love). Further to that Binsenweisheit, it is about ordinary sorrows and the emotionality of cooking. The author manages to build sentences that are at the same time beautiful, true and funny. I was surprised by the fact that this author is only three years older than me. I think, with me, it is the old problem that Danielito pointed out: too much information, not enough wisdom. But then again, wisdom may be overrated, too. I would ask for complete and permanent empathy if I had the wish granted. On the risk of being looked upon as a weirdo… ;-)

Petits plaisirs

1. The sounds of a thunderstorm just above one’s head. Standing on the doorstep and listening to the rain fall, focusing on different depths and sounds on different materials. Reaching out with one’s fingers, catching some huge drops, and thinking of someone very intently. Watching the lightening and letting the time and the tempest pass.
2. Cool sheets and a fast-paced hardback after a long day. Feeling sleep come over one’s entire being during the brief pleasure of reading and abandoning the story just before falling asleep, knowing it will remain for the next evening. Not really wanting to finish the book because it consists of perfect sentences and quirky characters and everything in-between.
3. Running on soft, sandy ground and getting a feeling of being-in-movement back. Smelling the damp ground and the forest. Stretching afterwards and feeling liquid because of the heat and the endolphins swimming in the blood.
4. Dinner in a proper Indian restaurant with someone who knows how to have conversations and laughs. Creating a little universe that consists merely of two people momentarily interrupted by a waiter with so much politeness it hurts.
5. Strolling through a market and observing everything to the smallest minute detail. Smelling everything and listening to random snippets of conversation while moving about. Speaking to people without the slightest intention of buying anything, and then getting involved with sympathies. Buying in the end all kinds of vegetables that take too long to cook, cloth that might become, one day, a pair of trousers, and flower seeds.

to whisper in the morning

sheep and coos

The PhD.

At times, it is hard to wake up every morning and believe in what you are doing. Today I’d much rather take the next bus and get out of here. Often I feel like my life has been suspended, and that my personal life has shrunk to a ridiculous dwarf size. The project takes over all aspects of my life, including dreams and walks. I stopped being wired, because, after six months of that, I was going crazy, and I just did not have the strength to go on being a rattling, jittery, nervy insomniac. I now realise how destabilising indifference can be. I have never been indifferent to what I do, but it seems to be a side effect of the exhaustion. It is also related to the intensity of emotions I need to face when working with people, both those that are breaking down crying during my interviews, and those that do not care about what arrangements we have made. I cannot help those who were not very lucky in their lives, and my questions precipitate tears. I feel inadequately trained to relate to them successfully, and some of the asymmetries will remain, and make me feel sick. The thought crosses my mind: all this adds up to is possibly just another degree for yours truly. I have never been bored with my studies, but it seems that I am saturated of them now. The thing is, I cannot find an excuse good enough to leave, even though my heart is not entirely (or should I say, at all) here at the moment. I chose this, I am the agent of this mess, so I better sit it out, and try to work against the exhaustion and the feeling that (it’s all a lot of oysters but no pearls) I am not in my pool here and slightly out of my depth. Hopefully it will change again, and I will find the pleasure back, and I will get rid of the anxieties that are deeply buried in my lungs and that burst into the open in the form of carbohydrate cravings. What if it will not? Eight months is a very long time to be spent with all the annoyances and frustrations of fieldwork. We get into things so easily and we change so much over the course of time, so that what once has occupied our whole mind changes so much that even the formerly most fundamental premises stop making sense. If I change so much in the course of six months, how likely is it that I will still be interested by anything academic in my thirties? I am frightened and bored by the idea of having an academic career, particularly by the stress, the mobility and the singularity (not to say loneliness?) it may entail.Here I am on the road a bit further away from a naďve starting point. Even one of my most powerful symbols of quest, that of the Warrior of the Light, has been appropriated by some artist in relation to Gigi B. I was deeply offended, but I suppose I needed to realise that my spiritual quest is superficial and driven by the consumption-desire of one particular best selling Brazilian’s oeuvre, among other highly eclectic modernist narratives of development, growth and improvement. Der Bildungsroman in all new shapes and sizes. It did hit a nerve at the time, but growing up disappoints, corrupts, deceives, and draws up new obsessions, replacing old obsessions, of equally dubious quality. Some desires remain the same, unfulfilled. Sincerely, still, and hopefully still learning, growing, yours, Candide-Nutshell, in a moment of Endeavour-Lost

In the well

I devoured yet another Murakami. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle accompanied me on my journey back to the field. It contains the usual strange combination of a beautiful language that retains some of its exotic appeal even in translation, of a story full of magic and desire, of metaphors out of the ordinary. The boy goes down a well to think and is able to perceive the stars better from there. He later on goes through the walls of this well, deep down, and gets to a hotel room in an attempt to bring back his wife. The dream narrative is, at times, stronger and more appealing than the real one, and progressively both get entwined in twisted ways. It is a story of pain and torture, of being in one’s skin and being skinned and being within the mind, and of being inadequate and set into patterns of being-together, and of being restless and alone and of the tinkling of spoons on metal in clean, modern kitchens in the expectation of guests. It is a story about the powers that move people and cats. I was disappointed of but one thing: not enough love story here, as the wife is mainly absent and prostitutes of the mind are too eerie to be considered, meaningfully, partners. I am not sure, however, whether the Chronicle is the best way into Murakami-Land. For that, I recommend Sweetheart Sputnik or Norwegian Wood.

Inner life of a blog

I never would have thought it would develop its own dynamics. As you have noticed, I have not mentioned a lot of Romania lately, bar to upload some photos. I’m still here though, working on my topic, interviewing people, trying to be as little awkward as possible. I’m doing a lot of thinking and writing about that to myself, and in view of the future, so I feel less of a need to speak about it here. While you may have gotten the idea that I am having a hell of a time, let me just say: not quite. It is very difficult to be here, and do the kind of work I attempt to do at the moment. But it is not all bad, and I am not unhappy, although I am complaining a lot and often get discouraged: some things are beautiful, some things make me happy, I try to be less tired, and more productive, and ready to learn more every day. People are hospitable, and sweet and friendly to me, and I enjoy the mountains. Two things I have not managed to accommodate myself with, and they are both related to politeness. I know, writing this, that this is something I need to overcome, and that it is related to very deep-seated ways of thinking about yourself and how one has come to act towards the world. First: I would like to say that it ain’t so, but I feel I really cannot rely on a majority of people. I know they have a lot of problems of their own, and are busy to make a living and a life, but why then do they promise things so lightly? And then break the promise and an ever so slight bit of my heart? I’ve come to expect very little when a promise is made to me, and yet it still affects me. Second: people in the village are not used to foreigners and do not give them much of a chance beyond superficialities. It makes me think about the times I possibly have made someone feel like I have given them no chance, and just put them into the ‘weird’ or ‘boring’ category and walked off without giving it a second thought. I sometimes have very little to say, given the language when no opening is made, and it is all highly internal talk. And my being in Britain for so long has made me too accommodating and for some reason makes me come across as insincere and indifferent in Romania. There is something about the rhetoric and how it works around here that I still haven’t understood or learnt.

Twisted Texts

As those who have known me longer surely remember, I have been harbouring this utopia for years. To be able to write a text so that it exactly tells what you intend it to tell, and so it works like superimposed layers of stories, each authentic, meaningful, fragranced, paced, and beautiful in its own right, but all working together, like an orchestra-as-text. Like the real-time counter part of a musical score composed of text, and, once opened, flowing like a rain of flowers and voices and enveloping your whole being. I am saying score, because this conveys the superpositioning, and the commingling in a certain degree of harmony, but it does not adequately survey the connectedness inherent in each voice, the relations existing between characters. It would be like a painting evolving in time, but I think it would be very unlike a movie, because the focus could change a lot better, and it would work in more emotional ways, as only words, carefully whispered, can. In any case, all metaphors fall short to describe what it is that I dream of, thereby making the point all the same. My attempts at writing,… well… let us say that the same aspiration is sustained in the intention but never even hinted at in the creation. Academic writing is a bitch, more especially so at the beginnings of PhD writing (well what else can I say? I haven’t been anywhere at the end yet… ;-)). After reading around the topic way over the boundaries, you finally resort yourself to start writing the real thing, not just notes. Stop reading, start writing, my supervisor tends to say to me when I have explored a bit too much again. You sit down and after some time, you just write.You’ve written it, and after some time it collapses into fractals. Beyond the simplest word you used in your writerly-excited flow open up ambiguities, universes in Orion’s belt and monkey symphonies that remain unaccounted and ignored. This is the period during which you become separated from the text, to see it, truly objectified, as if someone else had written it (usually translated into: ‘did I write this shit? I don’t remember any of this…’). This is difficult, because you know it will not feel the same as in-the-process-of-writing and you will become overly conscious of your huge limitations as a writer and as a person. You see how ineffectively you have caught and described the situation, how muddled your thoughts are on certain notions, and how you thoughtlessly collapsed things that were not meant to be ever confounded. You think that you may be making a lot of very little, and at the same time you are so concerned about proper representation, that you really get down to the last dot on the last i. And spend some sleepless nights in the text’s presence, pondering it. Then, tearing the whole text down, and rigging it, shaking it, fixing it, thereby creating something entirely different. By this time you may alternate burning with emotional connectedness and experiencing the most complete indifference to the text and its origins within a realer-than-real social life. You are almost tempted not to leave it lying because it might just collapse again, but you know you need to let it rest at the same time. Let it sediment. You need to work to such a different standard having to take into consideration fieldwork. Nothing like writing essays here, about books that remain stable in what their sentences have sedimented into. Ingold does not like the word ‘complexity’, but in its current usage meaning, this is exactly what it is. All social situations are so damn unstraightforward. Less so if you are going for a drink for an hour (but then again…) and more so if you want to write about them in a non-tendentious, rigorous, academically and disciplinarily valid, and, at the same time, beautiful and suggestive way. It takes a lot of time to get there, a lot of discipline and a lot of intellectual and writing work. Overwhelmingly much so (sentences like that also make the point). My problem that I cannot nail it yet, it is too twisted, and too much is trying to be there and yet fails to cohere and run like a smooth narrative should do. So this particular piece I am working on at the moment spawns comments like: you need to focus more, you need to be less ambiguous, you need to make this and that explicit, and take a lot less for granted. And yet, I know that, in the week I have until my deadline, it will not sort itself out. It will remain a thick knot of rope and pink lace and some bits of hay attached to it. It is a colourful corner of an impressionistic painting done by a mad surrealist who wanted to put her whole life into one single canvas, but then got sidetracked by the cat’s hunger pangs. And then went for a walk in the rose garden, caught the train to Moscow and discovered the snowflakes in the Red Square. Woke up two hours later back in her own bed thirsty and still sleepy. Dreamily reached out for her lover who had gone to work, felt the empty sheets, turned the radio on, got up to put the washing up, and water the flowers.

something silly

Monkeys on TV

Home is where you speak your mind. In one weekly magazine in Lux, they used to have this naked cartoon couple (believe me, it was not in the least indecent! Just cute…) and it used to say Love is… on the top and something or other on the bottom. Hence the first sentence. I am not a person you can hope to get to know fast. I admire people who can just speak to strangers about what really matters to them. I feel awkward when I happen to be that stranger. When I live with someone for some time, I will open up eventually. Not guard and censor everything I say, and rather shut up than destroy the harmony, and just start to tell what is on my mind. It takes some time, as I say, though, and I think it coincides also with me not bothering to get up earlier than the other person all the time. My host and me get along well most of the time. She is a wonderful woman, actually. We both hate monkeys on TV, and we will squeal and zap until they go away. We both pretend to get mad at the dog when she steals food, but actually we are just proud of her intelligence. We like to wonder at all kinds of every day things, ask a lot of speculative questions, and like to give even more speculative answers. She has a wicked sense of humour, self-deprecating, ironic and sharp. We both like good food, but we have a radically different conception of what that means for each of us. She likes really meaty and fatty things. When I make pasta she considers it hospital food. Chicken to me is just about acceptable as meat for me, but she thinks it is tasteless. She actually said this, and I almost felt offended, until she said ‘no it’s not about the cooking, it’s the meat itself’. Ah, that’s a relief! She made me think about a lot of materials around the house, and she is always interested in ‘how it works’. She can deal with all things around the house, including electricity, and I am very impressed by that. No, she can not just fix a light bulb, she replaces fuses, fixes cables, installs thermostats, repairs electric radiators, knows about AC and DC current and so forth in practice. I can just draw some diagrams, and if there is anything in the world I am afraid of, it is electricity. She managed to get me interested in plants. Before I came to live here, I was always someone who would love animals, hate plants [vegetarian too (though only outside of Romania), yes I remember the joke!]. Now I am tempted to buy some land, and make a garden with roses, spring onions, garlic, Sauerrampel, strawberries and tomatoes. Maybe I am just getting old! She is very diplomatic, and you notice that she disagrees only if you pay a lot of attention to an ever so slight change in her voice, or to a silence that you did not expect. But if you ask her opinion, she will tell you. She does not get angry for no reason, because she considers it a waste of energy. Probably lives a lot better that way. But as Ms Hausemer used to say, c’est une question de tempérament! One day when I was feeling down, she drove me to the place I needed to meet someone. On the way there, I gave some directions. We were supposed to turn right, up the hill. She stopped, looked left, and I noticed she thought something for herself, I said, turn right here, and she started turning left. I said, no, no, the other right. We laughed for at least half an hour about this. She had got it in her mind that it might be easier downhill. We both watch the horoscope and tell the other one about it if they missed it. She likes language and explains all the meanings of words to me carefully and slowly, and finds me kind of funny if I wonder about some weird word that reminds me of another one, entirely unrelated. Today the headline of the paper read: “sobolanul rozaliu” sare la “betivul transpirat”. She said, oh did you know guzgan means the same as sobolan. A sari means to jump, to skip, or, here, to attack. Betivul you know, it comes from a bea, to drink. Rozaliu is pink, of course. So: the pink rat attacks the sweaty drunkard. They are talking about Viorel Hrebenciuc, man with fingers in all kinds of (money) cakes, and Traian Basescu, president with suspension. Over and out. Your faithful insomniac, nutshell-the-cat

The Anthropologist-Hero

Did I tell you about how I encountered a bear and bit its ear off? I was walking along in the mountains toward the next sheepfold, where I was supposed to meet up with yet another person useful for my research, and, who, in the meantime had become a friend of mine (great when that happens). I was minding my own business, swinging my walking stick, thinking about the village gossip and whistling some tune that had stuck in my mind. As I lost altitude (like a plane – I did not say jumbo jet there, so be careful what you have just read into this!), I came into an overgrown area of hedges, and bushes, flowering away nastily as they do in the spring, to the great distress of allergic persons (not me though). When I walked around a bend in the narrow path, right in front of me, I discovered the backside of a bear. Sadly, the front was attached to it. He or she, I am not a biologist, remember, was apparently scanning the ground in front of it (the gender compromise) probably in search of truffles or something along those lines. I tried to step past as quietly as possible. I seriously had no interest in disturbing the animal. Of course, I stepped on a dry wood branch as you do (in cartoons, for instance), and the bear’s attention got attracted from truffle to trophy. I said hello, smilingly, because not only did I happen to be an anthropologist-hero, I am also of the polite kind (this would be the moment in the cartoon when the hero has gone off the cliff but has not begun its fall yet – in Disney films often supplemented by the character waving to the audience with a kind of stupid expression on its face – I am defying gravityyyyyyyy). The bear didn’t happen to be of the polite kind, and did not answer. It stood and waited, perfectly aware of its superior strength in near combat and stamina in pursuit, whether on land or on water (for the bear was also a surfbear, you know the kind). It was just curious to see how fear would creep into me suddenly, as my face turned from red to green to white-as-a-sheet in entertaining ways (given the lack of cable TV in bear communities). However, I refused to be scared (until now). I took off my anthropologist-hero-backpack (made by Camel, I am ashamed to admit) and was looking for my sword to cut its head off (still not scared). Of course, it had been forgotten somewhere. The backpack merely contained a microphone, a voice recorder, a notebook full of illegible, incoherent, but highly entertaining (for any other occasion than bear-encounters) scribble, some batteries (I wish I were McGyver, I could probably blow up the teddy), some mineral water bottle and… and… some home-made cakes. Let the negotiations begin. I give you these cakes and you get out of my fieldwork site, and we call it even (no I didn’t blow myself up like some kind of toad, I just put on my authoritative face and tone of voice – those who know me will picture it immediately). Cakes? You have to be kidding. Do you know how long the winter of my food discontent was and that I cannot stand the look of anything vegetarian, let alone berries in the widest possible sense (that is one hell of a rhetorical question my dbear). I’d rather have one of your ears, as an entrée, with truffles, and then your liver as a main menu. Sorry to disappoint you, but my liver doesn’t grow back, and is awfully loaded with the remains of the local rachiul. The drawbacks of fieldwork in rachiu-land. What about your legs? You won’t need those as a desk-bound academic. Ever heard of orange peel? Yeah! Life as a woman-anthropologist-hero is even harder. I am sure they taste awful. Arms? Come on! I seriously need my arms if I want to be a self-respecting writer… This charade went on for a while, and in this time cunning-as-a-nutshell was multitasking and looking out for the nearest shelter, or any kind of separation wall between me and mitts the size of tennis rackets and a will hellbent on the original sense of food (bloody traditionalists and revivalists!). But, let’s take it slowly, let’s not get too intimate too quickly, your Beariness: good to meet you, it needs to be celebrated somehow, before we proceed, and decide which bit of me is kosher for you… how to win time in a duel that is unfair from the start and which you didn’t really instigate! Toast to the health of your respective king or sultan or wife or whatever comes to a mind rushing with adrenaline. Due to lack of champagne I offered the contents of my mineral water bottle. When in Romania, never expect bottles to contain what they say they do on the label. Contained within was the strongest available rachiul of the blackest black market of Carpathia. The bear took a sip and started coughing, eyes red and tearful. I took the moment of confusion and phlegm to bite the busy bear’s ear (just for fun) and consequently make a run for the sheepfold my little eye had spied in the meantime. Definitely rekordverdächtig: at no time before has an anthropologist-hero jumped over fences so quickly and so unelegantly. When the bear got over the bittersweetness of high-percentage alcohol, it noticed the absence of its almost-for-sure-you-are-mine protein source, and accepted the cakes that I had left behind with a certain amount of thankfulness as frustration sweets. So if you see a bear with half a missing ear, it was the work of one desperate-and-cornered, though customarily vegetarian, anthropologist-hero.
Subtitle of this story: Baronesse von Münchhausen aka Nutshell-Kit gets a long long nose from telling absolute bearfiction-bonkers. Or: Schreiben Sie einen Aufsatz über eine gefährliche Begegnung und wie Sie aus dem Schlamassel wieder heraus kamen.

manicure

If you have some spare time, take the metro in Bucharest and watch the women. Perfectly groomed: hair done up, impeccable makeup, the longest possible eyelashes, high definition lipstick, high heels. Aware of the fact that they are stunningly beautiful, but not making a fuss about it. I will not even mention the kinds of sizes they wear, suffice it to tell that I had a hard time finding a winter jacket in the autumn that fitted me. Sure enough, I chose a Men’s Size S to have the adventure end sooner rather than later. As I said to my American friend: I feel like part of my femininity is lost here, gender limbo is upon me, and I am half boy, half girl. Not that this bothers me more than usual… My host took me to a beauty salon today, and I had a French manicure. It took about half an hour, the person who did it was very kind with the foreigner. I was very curious about the process, and it did not hurt at all. I wonder if she noticed that I had never done a manicure. After it was done, and had dried, I looked at my hands. It felt like they belonged to someone else. They were true alien bodies. When I put on my jacket, I damaged the first nail, because it was not 100% dried. It will never last on me. Hence the picture of a perfect illusion. But is it not beautiful…